The Filter wants to be your internet friend. And unlike Facebook, it wants to help you ignore all the morons, self-broadcasters and general noisy bombardment that characterises the modern web experience.
The pitch is simple. Web users are presented with limitless entertainment choices, and the majority of them are rubbish. To …

Follow the money

Titsup 2.0 already?

I just read the article and thought that's interesting, I'll go take a look. I was disappointed but also mildly amused to find a banner on the site stating "Damn It! Sorry, we're having a bad day and our site is currently down. We're fixing it and promise to be back online soon."

...went for a little lie down

Arse

So, out with it, Gabriel...

...how much information do you plan to collect from users, how much do you plan to save, and how much do you plan to sell to anyone who wants it, and for how much?

Oh, and am I the only one here who's always thought that half the fun of the Web was pointing and laughing at all the crap? I've always loved it, since Dotcom Bubble 1.0; in fact, much of my pointing and laughing was done at sites which promised to change the way the world buys its widgets, or something.

ps: y'mean, spam from spAmazon still gets through to your box? Jeez, I haven't seen anything from them in over a decade, once their domain hit my procmail list after I got slimed by them -- even though I never had an account with them, nor bought anything from there.

Underwhelming

Well, I managto get in, several hourslaterand they had fixed the site (either that or the Vulture Effect had subsided). Now, I realise that is still beta, but the start of the registration process asks you to choose 3 music genres from the list;

Blues

Jazz

Reggae

Country

Latin

Rock / Pop

Electronic

New Age

Soundtracks

Folk

R&B

World

Hip Hop

Now I realise that I'm quite the auld phart, but there are a few things about this list that deserve comment. For instance, where are the catagories such as "soul","Heavy Metal","Acid","Dance","Motown". These come straight to mind, I'm sure there are others, even without having to drill down into things like 50's, 60's 70's,80's etc

Also, since when are Rock and Pop synonymous? If I like KISS, does it follow that Rick Astley would also float my boat? (yes, I know, I am showing my age)

Does R&B refer to classic R&B or that modern rap flavoured dreck that has hijacked the term and from my position is indistinguishable from hip hop? (what is the difference between rap/r&B/Hip hop anyway)

Now, one could argue that they are only targeting the youf market and I am outside that demographic which I could understand but then why the hell do they include Jazz in the list? Or has jazz been taken by the rap crowd too and I hadn't yet noticed?

Soundtracks? Who makes a habit of buying just soundtracks? If I buy the soundtrack to Bridgett Jones Diary does it follow that I would also like to buy the orchestral score for say, Star Wars? If you are going to limit the number of genres to support why on earth would you include such a spurious genre as "soundtracks"

I've got to say if their algorithm is as "well polished" as their seed genres, I can't imagine it would do me much good.

I was hard pressed to select 2 from the list, and I only got that far because I chose pop/rock. Apparently that was insufficient and it wouldn't let me proceed any further.

have you tried it? It doesn't recommend anything new!

I reviewed The Filter yesterday for GoMo News. Basically it didn't recommended me anything that I hadn't already told it I liked!!!!!!

I went through telling the system more than it apparently needed to know, by selecting more artists than it asks for, I imported my Last FM preferences (40,000 tracks played), an extra way for the system to apparently recommend new music. I even downloaded the widget to intergrate into iTunes...and guess what?

I told it I like Air..It recommends Air

I told it I like Good Charlotte ..It recommends Good Charlotte

I told it....yada yada yada...

What was The FIlter doing..ringing up my best freinds and asking them!! Is that how Boolean mathematics works :-)

Is that...

Cross-marketing, full stop.

I fail to see how taking my interests and suggesting more crap which I may or may not be interested in is 'filtering' - sounds just like cross-marketing to me.

True filtering would be ONLY displaying content relevant to the interests I have given - ie. if I say that all I'm interested in is Lost and Madonna, it'll give me results from the web and news relevant to Lost and/or Madonna, Lost DVDs, Madonna CDs, etc. There's a name for this system - 'Google'*

rickrolled?

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

What a painful process it is to get registered - random genre picks and a very small range of items to rate.

Finally get a login and it gets worse! The first three CDs it said I'd like are:

Emenem / 50 Cent / Usher

even though I have zero rated these artists *and* genres.

OK, give it a go with something it can handle. Search for Genesis and it throws up 5 tracks to peruse - two of them are mis-titled, ffs, including the only one that has Mentor / Great Old One Peter Gabriel on it.

@Simon

"Just because there are citations in the OED, it doesn't mean they are correct. They just show current useage of a term/word, whether that be correct or incorrect."

What the hell is this thing "language" then, if it's not *what people say*. If you woke up tomorrow and everyone else in the UK was calling the colour of snow "black" and the colour of coal "white", would you have the brass neck to go around and tell everyone that they're wrong and that black is white?

Re: Re: Ex-Guardian writer?

He's not wrong

Too much choice can lead to paralysis of indecision or the avoidance of deciding because "it's all too confusing".

However, one of the reasons why old Napster saw a boost in CD sales and then a fall soon after it fell is that sometimes you don't know what you like until you hear it. And having your choices limited (either by being edited out as here, or having to pay first as with non-Napster sources) stops you from finding out new things.

To put it in biological terms, the realm of the possible with easy access to all entertainment is much greater than the artificial environment of Clearchannel/New Napster/Filtering.

The Patriots are at it again...

Seems familiar

this sounds an awful lot like a crappier, commercialier version of pandora http://www.pandora.com/ the music genome project. I found its reccomendations astonishingly good, as its not based on "genre" but on the music genome projects research and classification of songs based on many different criteria. Only available in the US now, unfortunately, they were forced by the RIAss. to implement IP filters. Pity, it was the only internet radio i had listened to for long, as their system semed to work. It sounds like this new one doesn't.

Words from the mouth of a dDead man?

Thomas Bayes.... described by Wikipedia as a 'nonconformist'. Also a clergyman, from an era of enthusiastic hobby scientists and Researchers, in the 1700's, where all that was New was Fair Game, waiting to be discovered and published as discovered for all to see and agree/disagree. An historic past time passtime and also present time passtime, which some would argue is way past time 42 do IT again when IT is open and waiting.... teasing and temptingly tantilising to all with an inquiring mind and an ability to solve problems.

And wow! What a lot of things have been attributed to Thomas Bayes, who was not a particularly prolific publisher of papers -silent waters must run deep. With some of his work being published posthumously. Now it seems nobody is anybody in the world that is AI [Artificial Intelligence], without name-dropping Bayes or 'Baysian inference' into the jargon/feed.

But thanks for the reminder, Chris Williams. Sometimes it payes sweetly to revisit even endlessly talked about topics/names/concepts, in case they warrant a second look/hide useful MetaData in the chaff/background noise.

And what's this? A Baysian paper I have not read....

"Divine Benevolence or an Attempt to Prove That the Principal End of the Divine Providence and Government is the Happiness of His Creatures (1731), by Thomas Bayes".

http://www.kingston.ac.uk/~ku12881/Bayes/bayes.html

Looks Fresh, even now. Well played that fellow -looks like it will be a six. Time to check IT out.

From Banksy to Baysie to Count Basie, all in one evening -transparent time-travel and task switching -on the Internet Super Freeway.

@Seems familiar

I thought Pandora was good too <sniff> but you might want to try Radio Paradise (radioparadise.com or it's in iTunes under Alternative) for a very eclectic mix... No gobby DJ''s or ads just the occasional station ident. No repeats (well, not in one day) and sometimes amazing playlists for hours on end...

Re: Ex-Guardian writer?

Simon, you got the wrong reference. You should have referred to a manual of style rather than a history of usage. Here's the summary: In English, "hoi polloi" is considered a noun phrase, so it's treated like a single word; hence "the hoi polloi". Some people argue that for this to be the case, the word should be hyphenated ("hoi-polloi") or compounded ("hoipolloi"), and so, they argue, either "the" or "hoi" is redundant.

The Amazon scheme works okay

Okay, I've never actually bought anything it has recommended, but I have borrowed DVDs and CDs based on it and found it does a pretty good job. They have a nice little link that tells you on which purchase they have recommended something and it allows you to ignore that, so if you bought a present of something you hate then it won't use that to create recommendations. Once you get rid of all the recommendations that you already have or know that you hate, it works pretty well.

It doesn't really seem all that complicated to create an algorithm that does

Man1 likes U2, The Police, New Order

Man2 likes U2, The Police, Genesis

Recommend Genesis to Man1

Recommend New Order to Man2

Just a large multi-dimensional array and some correlating functions, job's a good 'un.

The Patriots?

It's not the economy, stupid!

El Reg seems to be expecting some kind of Web 2.0 implosion... and a certain Andrew Orlowski has been denying the existence of Web 2.0 for ages. The mistake folk seem to be making on this site is equating Web 2.0 (the web as we now use it) with the economic framework that has grown up around Web 2.0. The argument runs like this: the real world and the real economy are intrinsically linked. If you can't make money from a cultural activity in the real world, then it isn't significant because people will always pay for something that is important to them. Web 2.0 is an on-line version of the real world, and as you can't make money from Web 2.0, then (QED) Web 2.0 doesn't matter.

But this ignores the fact that the Web 2.0 economy (as defined by the provision of Web 2.0 services) is still largely peripheral to normal Web 2.0 use. Google goes bankrupt tomorrow? Everyone switches to Yahoo and Web 2.0 life goes on as usual. Wiki gets wiped out? A replacement will spring up in a few weeks (if not days). Unlike the real world, Web 2.0 society doesn't need Web 2.0 economy: the success of video sharing doesn't depend on the ability of YouTube to make money and the future of social networking doesn't lie in the advertising revenues of FaceBook and Myspace. Start up costs are so low, overheads so small and the economies of scale so high that Web 2.0 can get by on a much smaller investment than is possible for real world services. For Web 2.0, the on-line megacorps are entirely disposable because they are so easy to replace. The reason there is so little money to be made from Web 2.0 is because Web 2.0 needs so little money to get by.

Web 3.0 - the web where BT allows you to use only one search engine, and where Virgin allow you to use only one video sharing site - now that will be a different matter altogether.

Only Indie Bands 4 Me

Pfft

Peter Gabriel........I fart in your general direction!

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

A real recommendation engine wouldn't ask you to choose three genres to begin with, especially not using that list (there are many missing as others have stated). They should ask people to input some of their favourite tracks and then determine the genres people prefer from that list. The more of your favourite tracks you enter, the more accurate it would become.

As for taste matching.....great, so it offers people another way to become sheep to other peoples tastes?

Yes, I hate Phil Collins too

Hmm

Why do you have to tell it what you like? Why can't it just tap into <insert favourite media player here> and listen, why hasn't it already perused my media directories to make sure it isn't recommending stuff I already own?

Whatever happened to listening to the radio, going online or to concerts to find new music?

time to sort this out

As for the Web2.0 economy / net neutrality freak: There is very little money in web 2.0 because.... drumrolll .... the content is not worth paying for, and advertising isn't very effective in a majority of applications, people's brains are active, poking their friends, not dreaming with an inactive brain while TV ads parade by. They simple have better things to do than play bingo.

As for the "we have a new algorithm that will find stuff for you" delusionals.... errr... the reward in finding something is that it was HARD to find. If you make it easy to find, it becomes less interesting. People do not make quantifiable judgements on the quality of music, they seek something to define their individuality. Is my individuality defined by an algorithm recommending me Oasis because I like Blur? NO. NO. NO.

And as for "genres" omfg. Is it dubstep, newstep, dub, dubby techno, garage or grime? Good luck with that categorisation. 3 dubstep fans could argue for 1 hours about it. Pick the wrong subgenre label and I will think I don't like the music, and therefore not click, however similar it is to its sister genres. Seeing as the job of a good musician is to combine and confound categories and categorisation, this shit is DOOMED i say. DOOMED.

Of course, technologists and consumers and marketeers don't understand this because they think they are making rational, quantifiable decisions about ART. They are not. It's like trying to disprove the existence of God. Talk all you want, it's still a mystery, and it's BETTER if it's a mystery.

Needs work...

...to say the least! After 13 years I still await the first of these recommendation engines that actually recommends me something surprising that I'd be interested in, and I include Amazon in that; the only benefit seems to be with pre-orders; I've had the odd recommendation for an author's upcoming new title that I was unaware of (new Neal Stephenson title most recently, on Bookrabbit I seem to remember), but that's about it. As for this effort, its very buggy (westerns mixed up with sci-fi, incorrect pack shots etc), and initial taxonomy seems decidedly odd (and dare I say it, American). The other big flaw, especially on the movie side, is their trick of giving a movie title, but without an image, making many movies (e.g. remakes) impossible to rate without delving into the product detail, and who can be bothered with that? At least it doesn't have the annoying Amazon habit (yet) of recommending you the same movie in a million different versions/formats; if I say I dislike say, "Braveheart" on DVD, I'm hardly going to want it on NTSC VHS am I? Doesn't stop Amazon trying to flog me it that way though.

@Anthony

Language...

... is a mechanism for communication, and communication works best when language usage isn't ambiguous. Precision in the use of vocabulary and (most importantly) grammar ensures that if the listener hears the words, he/she understands what the speaker intended to communicate.

So when the illiterati dribble on in text-speak and fail to use language properly, it simply increases the likelihood of miscommunication and misunderstanding. That's why we should continue to point out grammatical errors and to correct them.

I might sound like a grammar Nazi, but I've just watch a TV advert for Dettol that refers to "one bacteria"* and I've had to lie down in a dark place to recover... I haven't felt this bad since Baby BMI produced a TV ad in the North-West that advised about the "Additional fee for credit card's"... the Apostrophe Protection Society (there really is one) was not amused.

[* The singular form of the plural noun "bacteria" is "bacterium". I despair about the extent of the damage that lliterate advertising droids have done to our language.]

language is a mechanism for communication?

Man, you're like, so retarded. Language is a hell of a lot more than a "mechanism for communication," buddy. Language is identity. And you know what? People like to be a bit individual with their identity. What are you going to nazify next, you wanna go round london and correct everyone every time they use a double negative? Interesting that the double negative is actually standard in Lithuanian, the most archaic living language in Europe, closest to sanskrit. So maybe you should go round Oxford and tell everyone to use the double negative because it's "correct".

There. I used "bad" grammar and you still understood me. To expand your narrow perception of the function of language, I suggest you read a freaking book about it.